


No Army But My Own (the stars are gaslights remix)

by negativecosine



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-15
Updated: 2013-03-15
Packaged: 2017-12-05 08:42:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/721105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/negativecosine/pseuds/negativecosine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade gets political.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Army But My Own (the stars are gaslights remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elemental](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elemental/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Me and My Army](https://archiveofourown.org/works/303375) by [Elemental](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elemental/pseuds/Elemental). 



> This was a delight to remix- there was a _lot_ to work with, and I feel like I could've played around in this AU forever. Thanks, Elemental!

(the stars are gaslights remix)

Jade knows what they are doing, and she is going to stop them. 

It is actually kind of upsetting! Jade loves John a LOT, okay, and she really likes most of the trolls! Eridan and Feferi are so pretty and weird and she wants to put them in a tank and study them FOREVER, and Karkat smells weird and nice and hugs REALLY well even though he grumbles like a grumpy bitch the whole time, and Nepeta is basically the cutest thing that exists! Even if Jade always dearly wants to just. Chase her. 

Jade REALLY likes the trolls. And she wants them to stay. REALLY wants them to stay. But this is just really stupid! It is like maybe they think that humans are all incredibly dumb? And for some reason John thinks so too? And Rose has definitely been in CAHOOTS with the whole deal, there are so many sneaky plans just stink of Rose Thinks She Knows Better Than Everyone Ever. 

She does try to talk to them about it first! Of course she does, they are her best friends in the whole world, and of course she trusts Rose with her life, and she trusts John with everyone's lives, all the time! But there is a lot of hoo hoo you don't have to worry your cute island head about this, it is just complicated political drama and you don't care about that because hardly anything blows up. From Rose, that's understandable, it's kind of how Rose shows affection is being a huge pretentious bossy-pants. But from John it is really insulting! John knows Jade better than anyone knows anyone else, and so it is just MADDENING to literally be patted on the head and told to go shoot something. Just because he got a really stupid early growth spurt he thinks he knows more about politics when he actually doesn't know anything! He just wants his friends to win. 

Which is kind of fair but not if they're going to cheat!!! 

She also tries talking to Feferi about it directly, which is semi-successful. It goes like this: 

Feferi: [adorable fish puns]  
Jade: yes but that's kind of dishonest don't you think!!  
Feferi: [adorable fish pun about human-on-human-type genocides and wars and stuff]  
Jade: what no that's not the same thing at all  
Feferi: but w)(y not? )(OW IS IT T)(AT DIFF-ER---ENT  
Jade:  
Feferi:  
Jade: but you're not actually gonna kill any humans  
Feferi:  
Jade: you're not ACTUALLY GONNA KILL ANYONE RIGHT  
Feferi: I never want to krill ANYON---E 

So that's... something. At least Feferi doesn't WANT to win a cold war via subterfuge and colonize an entire planet with the last remains of a group of super violent people? 

That does not mean she won't though. 

Next Jade tries Karkat. It goes like this: 

Karkat: [yelling]  
Jade: [buttgrabs]  
Karkat: [more yelling but also lots of blushing ahaha what that's so CUTE]  
Jade: but no really, are you guys really gonna  
Karkat: [less yelling]  
Karkat: [looking incredibly guilty]  
Karkat: [has the literal opposite of a poker face]  
Jade: what  
Karkat: [how did he survive this long with crazy death blood (apparently) if this is all it takes to turn him bright red]  
Jade: are you okay with that  
Karkat: I JUST  
Karkat: DON'T WANT US ALL TO DIE AGAIN  
Karkat: THAT REALLY SUCKED 

Then they have sort of solemn sad makeouts on Feferi's bed, which is a kind of political statement Jade could really get used to! But also then Karkat has some sort of really stupid romance-chart related crisis about it, so she sort of kisses him on the ear and leaves him to sort himself out. 

Jade doesn't actually INTEND to TAKE THE EMPRESS OUT or anything. That would be terrible! Because Feferi's super delightful, and also because Karkat's right, there's not a lot of ways to do this that don't involve all her friends dying, possibly in a not-temporary way! That would be really really shitty. But it is NOT the worst-case scenario. 

So maybe Jade does a bit of... sabotage. Possibly. 

Possibly this involves Dave and hilarious hacking hijinks. Dave is not any kind of programmer! Nor is Jade! And they are up against Sollux who is like tech support for an entire SPECIES, so sometimes what their bold human resistance efforts involve is really dedicated trolling (ha) in youtube comments. Dave has got that down to an art form, he is obsessive about realism of "believably terrible bullshit there is nothing worse on this planet harley i know youve only ever spent time on like squiddletown neopets and minecraft so just leave the heavy lifting to me." (Dave is so cute when he is terrible. Jade considers trying to get him to do makeouts in tandem with Karkat makeouts, but then considers that the amount of adorable might actually cause her to explode? Kind of a health hazard and almost definitely counts as a heroic death so no.) 

When they are not being the shittiest hackers in two collective universes, it is more fun, because that is when Jade talks Dave into doing things like "okay let's get out granddad's old parachutes and jump in to cut the fiber optic cable with your sword and then let's get pizza." And then they do exactly that! Which doesn't slow down Sollux's youtube shenanigans at all, but it does mess up the Equius-Eridan Communications System. She hears all about it from John at the next movie night, he's pretty convinced that it's anti-trollists. 

That, that's a little upsetting. But. The cool thing is, they're really not sabotaging the trolls! Not exactly. It's sabotaging the troll-instigated troll-sabotage. 

Here is the other thing: Feferi is really pretty! And she looks, by human standards, young- but like a young adult. Like an old-timey princess. Jade knows full well that by troll standards, she looks like a baby. The trolls are only letting her pull the stuff that she's pulling because she's all bubblegum pink and shiny and also can smile with lots of teeth and throw a trident really far. And that's also the thing working against her cause, with the humans, and it's so COMPLICATED, putting it like this! Everything that's good for human cooperation is bad for trolls, and Jade GETS it, she does! She gets why the shenanigans. The cahoots. 

But they are really bad cahoots. 

The first fake assasination attempt is terrifying. Jade watches the clip on youtube of the back of Feferi's skull blowing out, over and over. She also watches the jacked security camera feeds with their literal troll sniper on a building almost three kilometers away, and she watches the little .gif that Dave rigged up to show the angles and the trajectory and she feels crazy, like a conspiracy theorist, like the really stupid awful kind that gets obsessed with the melting temperatures of steel. She knows, right in her gut, that it was real, that someone really wanted Feferi dead, that a lot of someones really want the trolls gone. 

But she also knows, right in her head, that Eridan pulled that trigger, that he knew Feferi would be fine. That Sollux leaked the video to the international press less than five minutes later.

The second fake assasination attempt has twenty-four casualties and one hundred and forty-three injuries. Feferi heals every single one of those injuries, short of scraped knees. She does it on the nightly news, with replays every morning for the week after that. Every single one of those hundred and forty-three are fine, maybe in better health. Seventy-five of them go on national television to publically thank Feferi (Empress, they call her the Empress, which is her proper title but creeps Jade out badly), they all vet the Alternians because their little fish princess kissed them better. But twenty-four people are dead because of the bomb that Equius made. That John helped rig into that truck. 

Jade does not tell Dave that. Jade does not want to break his heart. Dave loves John like Jade loves Rose, and Jade knows that she has let Rose get away with a lot. A lot a lot. And so she'll give Dave that luxury too. 

Besides, his face gets really gross when he cries. 

Through all this, the weirdest, weirdest part is movie night. They still do movie night! Every Thursday night, or nearly every one. At eightish or nine. Sometimes Rose brings a bottle of wine and her knitting. Sometimes she brings Kanaya and they make out shamelessly. Dave brings his laptop and claims of "livetweeting the shitshow," and shamelessly drinks from Rose's wine bottle. John makes a different snack every time. Usually the majority only makes it through one terrible movie before retreat- Rose to either write fanfiction of whatever movie they're watching, or make out with Kanaya, depending; Dave to heckle Rose or outside to play chicken with the paparazzi; Jade usually just conks out where she lays; Karkat, when he comes, never even makes it through the first movie, always rants himself into a coma on the nearest lap. (PRECIOUS. PRECIOUS KARKAT. HE GROWLS IN HIS SLEEP. SOMETIMES IT HAPPENS IN NEPETA'S LAP AND JADE SHIPS IT LIKE FEDEX.) 

But John and Feferi, they always make it through the second movie, and the third. And John and Feferi do Friday night movie night, and sometimes Monday nights too, which almost no one comes to because they are all very busy and also very sick of John's movies. John still halfheartedly invites Jade to Fridays, but no one really is invited to Mondays. So sometimes Jade goes to John's place on Tuesday mornings, to see where John and Feferi have passed out in a sort of heap with the DVD menu blaring on repeat. Jade's spacey powers are still enough that she can pop in, and look at them, and look at the way John's hand is tangled in Feferi's hair, and Feferi's sweet little face-fins flutter as she snores gently. And then Jade pops out again--usually home, but one time directly to Dave's. 

Dave is an early riser. Also a late sleeper. Dave is just kind of bad at sleeping, actually. But it means he's awake when Jade pops in, and he's got his sword out and feet spread in a clear threat, and he holds that for a second before relaxing and nodding silently to her, recaptchalogging the sword and standing up normally. (Or shuffling into his normal slumping weird posture, whatever.) He's still in his card-suite pajama bottoms, and there's no gel in his hair, and there are blanket-wrinkles pressed into his bare chest leaving dark little fault-lines all over him like canyons on a desert. 

Jade sits him down, and steals some instant coffee from his cupboards and chokes it down, and tells him more about the bomb. 

She was really really right about that gross-face-crying thing. He doesn't do it much, gets a handle on himself pretty fast, but he can't handle the thing about John, he can't handle that at all. He gets tears and snot all over Jade's shirt, and she shooshes him like a champ and tries to just squish him right in between her breasts so she can feel his hot sad breath on her sternum through the damp cotton, and when he gets it all choked down she lets him pull away on his own. 

She asks him what he wants to do. It goes like this: 

Dave: [mumbling with not as many colorful metaphors as usual]  
Jade: Yeah but at this point any actual sabotage is going to... well, make them look better, right? Make them sympathetic?  
Dave: [cagey non-answer]  
Jade: I know that's not... NOT what we want, but, there has got to be a better way to do this.  
Dave: [some weirdly dated political jokes and references to the game]  
Jade: Yeah but it's not like there's anywhere else for them to go! And no good way to hide them, or make everyone forget about th-

At this point Dave interrupts her and doesn't mumble and all his words are real words and none of it is rapping or threats to flip off any handles. It is, actually, a pretty good plan. 

Dave goes to Aradia first, obviously, because she's always been pretty easy for him to team up with. They could've done a lot of really weird side-quests together, Jade thinks, if everyone had played the same game. (Jade thinks a lot about what if everyone had played the same game. There's a lot of appeal, and a lot of stuff that could have gone really, really wrong.) 

 

Dave wants to get Terezi in on it too, and has all sorts of excellent arguments in favor of this, ranging from "shes a seer of mind she could tell us idk like what if everyone goes crazy if we pull this" to "shes my bro come on i hate keeping secrets from bros and again seer of mind she can totally just do freaky mind thing on me and then shell know everything do you want that" to "if we dont tell her shell kill me again which really sucks ok" to a sort of whining simple little "jade cmon can i just hint." The cadence and frantic unpunctuated mess of his reasoning only convinces Jade further: Terezi cannot know. She's killed John before, hasn't she? Which Dave always conveniently forgets about, and if Jade reminds him he gets really weird about it. Plus she's killed Vriska, which John used to get weird about (but doesn't anymore? for some reason?), PLUS Jade's seen her in the background of news stories on T.V. coming out of what look like super private and important meetings with old white men in suits. They always seem terrified of her, and on the rare occasion that the camera accidentally catches a handshake, she can always see them wince a little when she digs her claws in. No, they can't tell Terezi. 

Jade, on the other hand, obviously want to tell Karkat. Dave reasons her out of this with a lot of "he will literally blow all his gaskets" and then goes on to describe the intricate gasketry that Karkat's little angry body surely contains, all of which is apparently super volatile and whatever blah blah blah FINE, Dave, we won't tell Karkat. 

Privately Jade hates thinking like this, thinking like her good friends are... what, liabilities, to her super secret plan to sabotage their secret plan to sabotage themselves or whatever. She hates thinking that Karkat wouldn't just, AGREE, that this is a way better plan than what they've been doing and would obviously have way fewer casualties and way less lying and subterfuge and- 

They both agree pretty easily to not tell Rose. OBVIOUSLY, jeeze. But for Dave this means he has to almost completely cut her off, because he is completely incapable of talking to her without spilling all his darkest secrets and whatever. He has a SEER THING, he has a THING FOR SEERS, and Jade tells him this and he sort of looks ashamed but not really. 

So in the end, it's just Jade and Dave and Aradia (who seems fine with totally ignoring fish-orders, may the troll-gods bless her weird revolutionary heart) and, for some reason, Tavros. Tavros just sort of walked in on the three of them planning, and sat down right next to Dave, and leaned in and showed him where the maps were a little innaccurate. Whatever, Tavros can stay too. He's a lot less, uh, ridiculous-misunderstanding-totally-ruining-everything-forever-prone anymore, and also he and Vriska are "off again," with whatever their entire deal is, and honestly he seems to kind of like being included. He's mostly quiet and thoughtful and has a good eye for detail, which is great because she and Aradia both get into these weird moods of gung-ho It Has To Work Or Else blindness, and Dave is more of a play-it-by-ear guy. 

The plans take a long time, though. Because in the meantime, John's spending more time on Feferi's ship. And Feferi's publicity schedule is stepping up significantly. 

The handshake-photo-ops with members of the human government, Jade expects. The baby-kissing and the honest-to-god townhall meetings, she can almost understand. But there's more other trolls making the spotlight now, too. Kanaya's dresses on Oscar nominees, making front-page news on a slow day ("ALIEN COUTURE: TRAITORS OR TRENDSETTERS"); Eridan on the Daily Show, tucking his fins back against his face and throwing a charming smile for the cameras as he blatantly lies about a lot of troll romance stuff to sound a little more human-friendly; Equius doing an honest to god TED talk on robotics. (Jade takes notes on that one.) 

It's a bit weird, who they're putting out in front of the cameras, who they're keeping back behind the scenes. They've pretty much _de facto_ settled in America, because Feferi's ship is parked in Washington, so Seattle gets used as a sort of international hub for a lot of diplomatic stuff. But as far as Jade can tell, Sollux has never shown his face on television, nor Aradia or Nepeta. Karkat's face is recognized but not publically well-known, since he generally shows up as Feferi's bodyguard. (His entire body is shorter than her fork thingy, but also, Jade has seen him fight.) Tavros is completely unknown, as is Aradia. Terezi, Kanaya, and Vriska, less so-- though Jade's not at all surprised that the Alternian P.R. Conglomerate isn't letting her near any microphones-- and also, Gamzee seems to be missing completely. 

The plans, the PLANS, as Jade pronounces them, are nearly ready when this occurs to her. They know how they're going to get each individual troll in place, they know how it'll all be coordinated, but the sort of forgot about the clown. 

"We sort of forgot about the clown," Jade says, interrupting Aradia mid-sentence. Tavros' face goes sort of pained, and Dave looks weirdly constipated. Jade looks to Aradia. "Where's he? He came through, right? With the rest of you?" 

Aradia has this gorgeous look about her face that basically always says "I'm plotting something wicked, ask me how!" But she's sort of blank, now, like she's trying to remember something that she can't quite grasp at. "Who?" she says. 

Dave's crumpleface dissolves a little. "What do you mean _who_ ," he says, surprisingly unmumbley, "Psychotic juggalo? Killed everyone until Vantas cuddled his ass quiet? No one's said anything about him since-" 

"What are you talking about," says Tavros. He still looks hurt, looks like he aches uncomfortably all over, and his voice snags a little at the edges. "No one ever-" 

"Oh," says Jade, and grabs Dave, and pulls him up off the floor and into the shitty kitchenette in his apartment, leaving the two trolls sitting awkwardly around an empty pizza box and a bunch of low-res online map printouts. 

"I think he's clownbraining-" 

"-chucklefucking?" 

"Whatever stupid trollword!" she says quickly, determined to not let Dave crawl up language's ass and waste any more valuable time. "Maybe they really all forgot about him, because he's making them, because.... what." 

"Chance at the fishthrone?" Dave guesses. 

"Think he really wants it?" 

Dave frowns a little, and looks to be thinking hard on some weird timeline stuff. "Nah. Something else, then, maybe he just wants to hide. Who knows why clowns do anything?" 

"So why don't John or Rose remember him, if we do?" 

He shrugs, looking pained. "Maybe they just don't care." 

Two days later, it's ready. The whole thing, gaping clown-hole and all. Jade trusts that Gamzee will... either just show up at the right time and place, or else get left behind in just the right way so as to not fuck everything up once they're gone. 

The bait is important, and Aradia and Tavros had to go back early to start laying it. The bait is this: Ultimate Movie Night. Aradia starts leaving out troll-DVDs (DVgrubs? Jade just sort of guesses with a lot of Alternian translations, and is right often enough that it's weird), mostly, and it's weirdly easy for Tavros to ask John how many of them have Earth equivalents, and then Jade pesters Karkat later that day to ask him if movie night's still on and can she bring anything, and Karkat's going to drag Terezi and Terezi's going to goad Vriska, and then Dave has to pester Rose which ensures that Kanaya's coming, and if Kanaya and Vriska are in the same place Equius and Eridan both suddenly have vested interests, and Nepeta because Equius and Sollux because Karkat, and of course Feferi because John in the first place. 

Thursday night, nine o'clock, they all descend on John's house in a staggered fit with illicit bottles of Faygo and coconut rum and movies and snacks and they raid John's linen closets and have spirited arguments about what they're going to watch first, and John and Feferi exchange _weary_ looks that Jade catches, and the little barbed hooks inside Jade kind of snag, and pull. Nine-thirty and everyone's piled onto the couch that was meant to seat three or four humans. Aradia and Dave agreed: nine-forty-six. They synchronized and everything. So they've got sixteen minutes (Jade's got a watch, just for tonight, it's itchy and sweaty on her wrist) to get the last one there. 

"How many cups do we need?" Jade asks everyone, pointedly levitating a bunch of cups out of the kitchen from where she's wedged between an impenetrable wall of Equius and a poky pile of Vriska. 

"Sixteen," everyone says automatically, almost in unison. 

"Really?" Jade says, and floats out sixteen cups to float in front of the television. She counts each one out, name and number, in order from the bottom of the blood thing, then the top, then the humans. The last cup floats there. "How many cups?" she says again, and something goes a little weird over the group. They were a wriggling, bickering, noisy pile of kids a second ago, but now they're all very quiet, very still. 

"How many of you are there?" Dave asks. He's all the way on the other end of the couch, perched on Terezi's lap, his legs tangled with Rose's. Jade knows the exact position of everyone in the room, even though she can't see them. "Count it off again. Four humans-" he counts them off, like taking roll, and his mumbling drawl makes it weird, surreal. "-and twelve trolls, right?" 

"Me," says Feferi, slowly, disentangling herself from the heap and standing up, her back to the television and the airborne empty cup, "Eridan, Equius-" 

"Wait," says Karkat.

"Okay," says Feferi, and her pretty face is all curved around her nose now, like it's all trying to scrunch down smaller. "From you, then. Karkat, Aradia, Tavros, Sollux-" she points each of them out, as if to an audience. "Nepeta, Kanaya, Terezi, that's seven. Why can't we count today? Vriska's eight of course! Equius, Eridan-" 

" _Wait_ ," says Karkat.

"Six minutes," says Dave. 

"We can't count at all today! It's like we're little wrigglers!" Feferi puffs out her cheeks, and it's adorable and a little sad, how confused she is. 

"Don't go by blood," says Aradia. Jade thanks her silently; she hates counting them out all rainbow-racism like that. "Go by how you feel." 

"What," says John, like he thinks this is ridiculous. Jade wishes she could wriggle over the mass of warm bodies to get to him, make him _see_ , why can't he see? But everyone is still very tense, almost frozen. 

"Karkat," says Feferi, "Eridan. Sollux, Equius, Aradia, Vriska-" Yes, Jade knows this will work, it will work like this, the _hole_ isn't in a number system, it's in their _friends_ , good, keep going. "-Tavros, Kanaya, Terezi, Karkat..." 

"FUCKING WAIT," says Karkat. 

"Three minutes." 

"What are you counting down to?" Rose asks Dave, kicking him a bit in the back of his knee. 

"WHERE DID HE GO?" says Karkat. He breaks free from the couch, swings around to stare at Terezi. "DID YOU SEE WHERE HE WENT?" 

"Oh," says Terezi, and it's like a light comes on in her face. Her cheeks color. "I thought you would know-" 

"Oh fuckin shit we forgot-" 

"WHY DID YOU SLURRY-DRINKING SELF-ABSORBED ATTENTION-STARVED _BULGE-STAINS_ -" (Jade thinks Karkat's cursing is _so_ much filthier in person, and she wants to hug him, but his claws are out, oh.) "-LET ME FORGET ABOUT-" 

"Hey motherfuckers," Gamzee says from the corner. Where he has been standing for sixteen minutes. Jade knows, she _knew_ he was there, she could _feel_ him there, just couldn't _see_ him, this huge weird blind spot. "Ready for a ride?" 

"One minute," Dave says urgently. Rose pinches him. " _What?_ " 

"One minute until _what_ ," she says low and dangerous. Karkat is sobbing, he is throwing himself at Gamzee and he is _miserable_ and Jade _hurts_ to hear him this upset, and Terezi is trying to hide behind Dave completely, and Feferi is just standing there, frozen, twisted to stare at Gamzee and Karkat and whatever the fuck they are doing, Jade can't even tell, it's not hugging and it's not murdering, and Gamzee seems weirdly placid throughout it, and it's a _really, really weird_ tableau when they finally all jolt out of existence and then back in again. 

Jade was a little distracted, so they're not exactly in the right spot-- a few kilometers off, it feels like, but it's not a big problem at this scale-- and she accidentally brought most of the living room furniture with them. She non-accidentally brought the ship parked beside them, and it's the first thing Feferi looks at when she regains her balance. 

"WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST-" Karkat disentangles from Gamzee and storms up to Jade, where she's trying like hell to get up from the fucking couch. 

"Ladies and gentletrolls," Dave says in his best terrible airline pilot drawl, "We have landed safely in 1963. The temperature here is a breezy shut the fuck up. Please return your tray tables to their full upright do not flip your shit and kill us all, and have a nice day." 

***

Later, Jade sits down with just the humans. She makes them get in a very nice pile she built out of "I don't know, Dave, STUFF, what does it matter," and Rose, the wonderful creature she is, dives right in. 

"Why here? Why now?" she asks first. "This political atmosphere really isn't all that much more stable, and you didn't move us far enough from civilization to hide." 

"Gives us time to work slower," Dave says, right as Jade says, "I didn't _want_ to be away from civilization!" 

John is furious, and is only in the pile under great protest, but even he can't hold the frown completely. "Why didn't you TELL us," he asks, which sounds to Jade like kind of more of a reasonable question. It's what she always wanted to ask him, in those first weird months. 

"You were being dickfaces!" she tells him, and Dave snorts. "And also you didn't care what happened to people!" She waves a hand at Dave, tries to make him look serious, because this isn't even funny anymore. "You didn't even care what you were doing," she says again, as serious as she can. John won't look at her, stares angrily at a squiddle in the middle-distance, but Rose catches her look and holds it. 

"It's not that we didn't care-" she says, in that soft, sweet, patronizing voice. 

"No, shut up!" Jade shouts over her, and if Karkat were here, even he would be appalled at Jade's feelings-pile ettiquette. "You were letting people get hurt- you were HURTING people, I don't think you thought they were even REAL PEOPLE, both of you, you were being total dicks and we had to take you away and give you time to adjust! And this gives us a LOT of time, because computers aren't even really a thing as much? And so a lot of people will just go _wow weird this is weird look at these aliens_ and they'll be scared as hell but they'll also know better than to put you on, on _youtube_ and you can't just _rig_ stuff and they'll get used to us, alright? And we'll grow into it, and they'll grow into us!" 

Somewhere around halfway through, she realizes her pronouns have changed. It's not the trolls that are "them," now, it's the humans. Fuck, she thinks, I'm as bad as all of us. But John's got a softer look about him, and Rose is squirming through the pile to link her elbow into hers, and she lapses back into silence, and you guess you'll just... you'll see how it goes from here, won't you?

Yeah, that'll be just fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Edited a whole bunch of pretty embarrassing errors out of here, woww. Thanks for the _amazing_ response, everyone, you're all rad as heck!


End file.
